Preparing To Farm
I write mainly for beginners--for young persons, and some not so young,
who are looking to farming as the vocation to which their future years
are to be given, by which their living is to be gained. In this chapter,
I would counsel young men, who, not having been reared in personal
contact with the daily and yearly round of a farmer's cares and duties,
purpose henceforth to live by farming.
To these I wou
d earnestly say, "No haste!" Our boys are in too great a
hurry to be men. They want to be bosses before they have qualified
themselves to be efficient journeymen. I have personally known several
instances of young men, fresh from school or from some city vocation,
buying or hiring a farm and undertaking to work it; and I cannot now
recall a single instance in which the attempt has succeeded; while
speedy failure has been the usual result. The assumption that farming is
a rude, simple matter, requiring little intellect and less experience,
has buried many a well-meaning youth under debts which the best efforts
of many subsequent years will barely enable him to pay off. In my
opinion, half our farmers now living would say, if questioned, that they
might better have waited longer before buying or hiring a farm.
When I was ten years old, my father took a job of clearing off the
mainly fallen and partially rotten timber--largely White Pine and Black
Ash--from fifty acres of level and then swampy land; and he and his two
boys gave most of the two ensuing years (1821-2) to the rugged task.
When it was finished, I--a boy of twelve years--could have taken just
such a tract of half-burned primitive forest as that was when we took
hold of it, and cleared it by an expenditure of seventy to eighty per
cent. of the labor we actually bestowed upon that. I had learned, in
clearing this, how to economize labor in any future undertaking of the
kind; and so every one learns by experience who steadily observes and
reflects. He must have been a very good farmer at the start, or a very
poor one afterward, who cannot grow a thousand bushels of grain much
cheaper at thirty years of age than he could at twenty.
To every young man who has had no farming experience, or very little,
yet who means to make farming his vocation, I say, Hire out, for the
coming year, to the very best farmer who will give you anything like the
value of your labor. Buy a very few choice books, (if you have them not
already,) which treat of Geology, Chemistry, Botany, and the application
of their truths in Practical Agriculture; give to these the close and
thoughtful attention of your few leisure hours; keep your eyes wide
open, and set down in a note-book or pocket-diary each night a minute of
whatever has been done on the farm that day, making a note of each
storm, shower, frost, hail, etc., and also of the date at which each
planted crop requires tillage or is ripe enough to harvest, and
ascertaining, so far as possible, what each crop produced on the farm
has cost, and which of them all are produced at a profit and which at a
loss. At the year's end, hire again to the same or another good farmer
and pursue the same course; and so do till you shall be twenty-four or
twenty-five years of age, which is young enough to marry, and quite
young enough to undertake the management of a farm. By this time, if you
have carefully saved and wisely invested your earnings, you will have
several hundred dollars; and, if you do not choose to migrate to some
region where land is very cheap, you will have found some one willing to
sell you a small farm on credit, taking a long mortgage as security.
Your money--assuming that you have only what you will have earned--will
all be wanted to fix up your building, buy a team and cow, with the few
implements needed, and supply you with provisions till you can grow
some. If you can start thus experienced and full-handed, you may, by
diligence, combined with good fortune, begin to make payments on your
mortgage at the close of your second year.
I hate debt as profoundly as any one can, but I do not consider this
really running into debt. One has more land than he needs, and does not
need his pay for it forthwith; another wants land, but lacks the means
of present payment. They two enter into an agreement mutually
advantageous, whereby the poorer has the present use and ultimate
fee-simple of the farm in question, in consideration of the payment of
certain sums as duly stipulated. Technically, the buyer becomes a
debtor; practically, I do not regard him as such, until payments fall
due which he is unable promptly to meet. Let him rigorously avoid all
other debt, and he need not shrink from nor be ashamed of this.
I have a high regard for scientific attainments; I wish every young man
were thoroughly instructed in the sciences which underlie the art of
farming. But all the learning on earth, though it may powerfully help to
make a good farmer, would not of itself make one. When a young man has
learned all that seminaries and lectures, books and cabinets, can teach
him, he still needs practice and experience to make him a good farmer.
--"But wouldn't you have a young man study in order that he may become a
good farmer?"
--If he has money, Yes. I believe a youth worth four or five thousand
dollars may wisely spend a tenth of his means in attending lectures, and
even courses of study, at any good seminary where Natural Science is
taught and applied to Agriculture. But life is short at best; and he who
has no means, or very little, cannot really afford to attend even an
Agricultural College. He can acquire so much of Science as is
indispensable in the cheaper way I have indicated. He cannot wisely
consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live.
He who has already mastered the art of farming, and has adequate means,
may of course buy a farm to-morrow, though he be barely or not quite of
age. He has little to learn from me. Yet I think even such have often
concluded, in after years, that they were too hasty in buying land--that
they might profitably have waited, and deliberated, and garnered the
treasures of experience, before they took the grave step of buying their
future home; with regard to which I shall make some suggestions in my
next chapter.
But I protest against a young man's declining or postponing the purchase
of a farm merely because he is not able to buy a great one. Twenty acres
of arable soil near a city or manufacturing village, forty acres in a
rural district of any old State, or eighty acres in a region just
beginning to be peopled by White men, is an ample area for any one who
is worth less than $2,000. If he understands his business, he will find
profitable employment hereon for every working hour: if he does not
understand farming, he will buy his experience dear enough on this, yet
more cheaply than he would on a wider area. Until he shall have more
money than he needs, let him beware of buying more land than he
absolutely wants.